- Ray Monde
It’s for your own good
Wait till your father gets home, collage and synthetic polymer paint, by Monde Monde
I’m frantically working on my final works for my next exhibition at the M16 Art Space in Canberra. The works follow a similar theme to my last show – exploring our childhood experiences and how they shape us as adults.
I’m obsessed about how as adults we relate to our child-self. As children we see every day things in extraordinary, disproportionate ways. This same distortion can be seen in how we remember our childhood experiences. Silly, crazy things stick in our minds and live with us all our lives, becoming increasingly vivid as we get older. But are these memories true?
There’s no rational narrative running through our childhood memories, the idea of a shark under our bed is a real as dad lurching at us with a wooden spoon. Our imagined fears are often more frightening than immediate threats.
This work Wait till your father gets home evokes the terror of a child who has been bad and awaiting punishment. Often the wait, and the imagination of the child was far more torturous than the actual punishment that was doled out.
The unreachable truth is whether the memory is real or concocted in the tangled-web of consciousness.
Hold still, this will sting a bit, collage and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 2016 by Monde Monde